Ronald M. Deutsch (1928–1987)

I am sure that this book was never sold in health food stores.

This is a very interesting and often entertaining book about diet fads from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It begins with Sylvester Grahame and his cracker and continues through the Battle Creek Sanitarium run by John Kellogg, and the cereal kings, W. K. Kellogg and C. W. Post., through Benarr McFaden's Physical Culture, Fletcher's intensive chewing, and other, sometimes sincere and sometimes venal offers of advice. Some of them lived to be old, some died in middle age, often of the very diseases they claimed to be able to cure. Some had ideas that were actually quite helpful, but often more due to coincidence than knowledge, and often mixed in with more dubious advice. Deutsch points out that medicine, until well into the nineteenth century, was primitive, and sometimes more harm than good, but even as it has advanced, people continue to follow much of the advice of the food fads, even when tests have found it to be useless or actually harmful. Much of their advice has simply become received wisdom.

One might pause at some of the statements: perhaps some of the faddists were on to something, recognizing that something worked, like eating wheat with the bran intact, without understanding why. And the advice on dietary supplements seems to have changed since the books were written. He blasts them as useless, but my doctors have recommended them. I am apparently one of the few people in the United States who ever had a Vitamin A deficiency. And sources such as Consumer Reports, whose motives are certainly not to encourage spending on dubious products, recommend some supplements, while warning that many others are of no value.

Deutsch then goes on to discuss the originally very feeble efforts of government to regulate food purity and and the veracity of advertising, but the laws were often very weak, the amount of time that it took to bring a case so long, and the penalties so minor that it was often more profitable to accept the fines as a source cost of business rather than reform a companies practices. He also blames the media for irresponsibility, giving charlatans publicity either to gain advertising or because it makes a good story. Every issue of a certain weekly magazine has on its cover another infallible diet and a high-calorie dessert. I often wonder, why, since my doctor wants me to lose weight, does he never recommend any of these diets if they are so good? And if each one solves all your weight problems, why is there a new one every week?

I'd like to see an update version of this book, or something similar.… (altro)